About us

Rotherham Heritage Service is based at Clifton Park Museum in Rotherham.

Clifton House was the home of the Walker family who ran Rotherham Iron Works. It became Rotherham’s Museum in 1893. The museum has fascinating rooms and exhibits, including Roman, ceramic and Victorian galleries and a Victorian Kitchen with a working Range. The York and Lancaster Regimental Museum and Rotherham’s Archives and Local Studies Service are also on site.

We also manage other heritage sites across the borough of Rotherham which includes Boston Castle. Boston Castle is an 19th Century hunting lodge, built for the Earl of Effingham in 1775. The Castle was refurbished in 2012 and is now a small visitor attraction which is set within Boston Park, with views of surrounding Rotherham and Sheffield.

At Rotherham Heritage Service our team aims to provide outstanding, inspiring and stimulating experiences for adults, families, children and young people. We achieve this by delivering inspiring activity programme within in our heritage.

Rotherham Archives and Local Studies is looking for a team of enthusiastic and committed volunteers to assist with work on our collections.

Role Description: Archives Volunteer

The primary role of volunteers in Archives and Local Studies is to assist us to carry out tasks that will contribute to the care and accessibility of our collections. These tasks may include constructing preservation packaging for archive materials; re-boxing, labelling or re-numbering items; and improving the description of items listed in our collections management database.

Full training for these tasks will be given, and volunteers will be supervised by staff who will be happy to answer questions and offer advice on aspects of working within the Archives and Local Studies sector. We aim to ensure that volunteers gain the best possible experience from their time spent assisting us, and we encourage volunteers to let us know what particular tasks, types of records, or skills that they wish to become familiar with.

Person Specification:

We are looking for the following qualities:

Friendly and approachable volunteers with good communications skills

Able to commit on a regular basis with good time-keeping skills

Attention to detail and good observational skills

An interest in/or knowledge of history or heritage qualification

Volunteers that are happy to work independently or as part of a team

IT skills or a willingness to learn IT skills

Key Duties

Help us to reduce the number of uncatalogued collections on our Cataloguing Action Plan by:

Learning to navigate our collections management database (CALM), with training from the Archivist if required

Referring to a list of 500+ archive collections that are listed in CALM at fonds level only (and are therefore uncatalogued), but are incorrectly marked as ‘catalogued’

Using CALM to identify those collections above that have extents of 1 item, 5 or less items, 10 or less items

Using CALM to determine the deposit status of the collections above

Completing the cataloguing of those collections above by creating series and item level records, following our order of priority (i.e. smallest donated collections first)

Locating, retrieving and re-numbering the re-catalogued archive materials in conjunction with one of our Archives and Local Studies Assistants

Transferring new catalogue numbers to the outer packaging, box fronts (and our location index if necessary) in conjunction with our Archives and Local Studies Assistants.

Keeping a record of all collections completed so that the Archivist can amend our Cataloguing Action Plan accordingly and add the completed collections to our Cataloguing Log spreadsheet.

Creating box lists for the larger uncatalogued collections

Support

We value all our volunteers and encourage the development of new skills and experience. In house training will be provided on a regular basis to help volunteers develop or enhance their skills.